Shakespeares of 1922

Lorenz Hart (1895–1943) & Morrie Ryskind (1895–1985)
From Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now

Interesting Links
“How Vaudeville Told the Story of America . . . to Americans” (Geoffrey Hilsabeck, LitHub)

“Play It Again, Ham [on Eddie Foy and Hamlet]” (Rachel B. Dankert, The Collation, Folger Shakespeare Library)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Life and Death of Vaudeville,” Fred Allen
• “Melodrama,” Rollin Lynde Hartt
• “The Hiartville Shakespeare Club,” Belle Marshall Locke

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Shakespeare in America: An Anthology from the Revolution to Now
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Sheet music cover for the Shakespearean burlesque Mr. Hamlet of Broadway, which debuted in December 1908. Duke University Libraries Digital Collections. Click on image to see the full cover. In the production, the legendary vaudeville star Eddy Foy played Joey Wheeze, a hotel janitor who fills in as Hamlet when a summer-stock troupe finds itself without their lead actor. The following summer, Edward Madden, the show’s lyricist, would write “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” with composer Gus Edwards—a song that child actor Georgie Price would debut to a theater audience.

Georgie Price was living with his parents and eight siblings in a small and decrepit tenement on 113th Street when Mary Timberg, the mother of teenage vaudevillian Herman Timberg, first heard the nine-year-old sing. In earlier years, when the Price family had lived in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Georgie had performed at bars and movie houses and competed at amateur nights in neighborhood theaters to earn some extra cash for the family. After the move to Harlem, his older brother Alec delivered clothes to the customers of a neighborhood tailor, and he often brought along Georgie. “Alec boasted of my singing talents at each stop he made,” Georgie recalled. “Their curiosity properly aroused, they would agree to give me the nickel I demanded. Mother Timberg was alone when I sang for her, and she was so impressed that she called in her neighbors to hear me.” Mary Timberg arranged to have Georgie sing at a Herman’s 18th birthday party in April 1909, an event attended by numerous celebrities, including opera star Enrico Caruso, who was stunned by the performance (and apparently believed the pint-sized boy was only six years old), and Gus Edwards, a singer and composer who had made a name for himself as a producer of vaudeville shows featuring children.*

Days after his “discovery,” Georgie was escorted to a concert hosted by Caruso at Wallack's Theatre in Times Square to benefit the family of slain police officer Joseph Petrosino. After the famous tenor performed, Edwards sang his new satirical hit “My Cousin Caruso” and then, keeping with the theme, Georgie made his stage debut with a spot-on parroting of Edwards imitating the opera star, an act greeted with wild ovations and encores, after which a triumphant Caruso hoisted the boy on his shoulder and carried him off the stage. Georgie moved in with Mary and Gus Edwards and became a star performer in various Edwards revues; his parents received his $10 weekly salary. That summer, singing as a stooge in the audience, Georgie introduced to the world the Gus Edwards & Edward Madden megahit “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” in the annual vaudeville revue School Boys and Girls at Hammerstein’s Victoria Theatre, weeks before the song was made even more famous by Lillian Lorraine in Ziegfeld Follies of 1909. He remained with the Edwards team until 1917, when he struck out on his own.

When Price was 22 years old, he met up with Lorenz Hart and Morrie Ryskind. Years earlier he had bought material for a comedy act from Lorenz through an agent, and he was now looking for a new sketch to try out at a vaudeville theater in Brooklyn. According to Gary Mormostein’s biography of Hart, when the two writers delivered the skit, “Shakespeares in 1922,” Price agreed to use it but insisted that they not attend because they would make him nervous. The writers went secretly, paid for seats in the gallery, and observed the audience’s enjoyment of Price’s performance of their material. The next day Price, not realizing his success had been witnessed, tried to convince the pair that the skit didn’t go over well and offered the two men $100 for their work—a ploy that initially caused Ryskind to lose his cool and refuse the payment until Hart talked him down. They took the money and Price continued using the act throughout the year.

In the sketch, Price plays five Shakespearean characters. Each role begins with an introductory refrain, followed by a condensed, over-the-top spoof of a soliloquy and ending with a burlesque of one of Jonson’s hits: Shylock sings a parody of “The Spaniard That Blighted My Life”; Hamlet sings “My Mammy”; King Lear, “April Showers”; Mark Antony, “After the Ball”; and Romeo, “Yoo-Hoo.” Since Price was well known for his imitations of (and rivalry with) Jolson, his performance would have made comedy from the very idea of Al Jolson playing various Shakespearean roles.

Vaudeville has a reputation as a lowbrow art for a rough-hewn audience, but the profusion of Shakespearean parodies in productions ranging from minstrel acts to Ziegfeld extravaganzas demonstrates that variety show audiences knew their Shakespeare—and knew it well. Price recalled how, when he was growing up, the noted stage actor “E. H. Sothern spent many hours with me perfecting the accents, inflections, and intonations used in some of his Shakespearean roles.” Hart and Ryskind’s sketch for Georgie Price, remarks theater historian Frances Teague, “invites the audience both to preen itself on cultural sophistication, and to sneer at both the stuffiness of high culture and the vulgarity of low. The audience laughs at Shakespeare’s simultaneous presence and absence from the stage, at the pretense that he must be an agent for respectability when such agency is displaced into colloquial jokes.” Or, as the vaudevillian Shylock says, “The plays will look like new / When I add a song or two.”

* Price was born on January 5, 1900, and his actual age (as with most child actors of the era) was a matter for confusion that he seemed to have encouraged for the rest of his life; a capsule biography provided during his radio days in the 1930s claimed “he was ‘discovered’ by Gus Edwards at the age of five”—four years before the verifiable events that launched his career. Some of the details of Price’s early life are taken from an unfinished memoir written in the 1950s; the document was uploaded to a website two decades ago by his son Marshall Price.

Notes: Antonio is Shylock’s nemesis in The Merchant of Venice and Alphonso Spagoni is the bullfighter in Al Jonson’s song “The Spaniard That Blighted My Life”; thus the name Antonio Spagoni in the parody of the song. Baseball commissioner Kenesaw Landis fined Babe Ruth $3,500 and suspended him for the first six weeks of the 1922 season after he violated the league’s rule against post-season barnstorming games. After his ill-fated barnstorming tour, Ruth signed with the B. F. Keith Circuit for a vaudeville show at New York’s Palace Theatre, where he participated in comedy sketches and performed a song written for him: “Little by Little and Bit by Bit, I Am Making a Vaudeville Hit!” Nella Melba was a world-famous soprano from Australia; Mary Garden was a Scottish American soprano.

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Broadway has a Shakespeare fad,
Actors all are Shakespeare mad. . . .
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Joey on the Cake Line

John O’Hara (1905–1970)
From John O’Hara: Four Novels of the 1930s

Interesting Links

“Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered: John O’Hara’s Pal Joey remains an exemplar of the epistolary novella” (Thomas Mallon, The Paris Review)

“The Tortured History of John O’Hara’s Pal Joey” (Levi Asher, Literary Kicks)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Christmas Poem,” John O’Hara
• “The Lily-White Boys,” William Maxwell

Buy the book
John O'Hara: Four Novels of the 1930s
Appointment in Samarra | Butterfield 8 | Hope of Heaven | Pal Joey

Cover artwork from the souvenir program for the 1952 Broadway revival of Pal Joey.

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“That was the only good thing I ever got out of booze, but mind you, Wilson, I wasn’t on a bender at the time I wrote it. I was perfectly sober!”

When the novelist John O’Hara was interviewed by gossip columnist Earl Wilson in 1948, he revealed how his most famous character, Pal Joey, was born during a post-alcoholic haze in a Manhattan hotel. A decade earlier O’Hara and his wife had just returned from a summer in England and were staying with her parents on the Upper East Side. His third novel (Hope of Heaven) was a commercial flop, the Hollywood novel he had hoped to write remained unwritten, and he was, as he admitted to Wilson, “broke.” So he told his wife he was heading back to Philadelphia to pound out his next story for The New Yorker at the Ben Franklin Hotel, where he occasionally stayed to work on his writing.

He never made it. Instead he met up nearby with some companions and “got stiff.” The next day he checked into The Pierre, a hotel thirty-three blocks south of his in-laws’ apartment, and spent another two days drinking. He woke up early Saturday morning and asked a hotel attendant what day and time it was.

At that point remorse set in. I asked, ‘What kind of god damn heel am I? I must be worse ’n anybody in the world.’ Then I figured, ‘No, there must be somebody worse than me — but who?’ Al Capone, maybe. Then I got it — maybe some night club masters of ceremonies I know.

By noon O’Hara had finished a draft of the first Pal Joey story and was on his way back home, where he confessed his misdeeds to his wife yet had the story to show for them.

“Pal Joey” was immediately accepted by The New Yorker and appeared in its October 22, 1938, issue. Editor-in-chief Harold Ross was particularly enthusiastic about the story and requested additional pieces featuring the same character. By the time the first story had appeared in the magazine, O’Hara was in California working as a screenwriter for RKO Studios (and later for Twentieth-Century Fox). When New Yorker fiction editor William Maxwell rejected one of the follow-up episodes, O’Hara reminded him that Ross had promised “when both of us were sober, that if I wrote him ten Pal Joey pieces I could say the hell with Hollywood.” All told, twelve would appear in the magazine, and fourteen stories—all written as letters from Joey to the emcee’s far more successful “friend” and rival Ted—would be collected as a book in October 1940.

“I don’t know whether you happened to see any of a series of pieces I’ve been doing for The New Yorker in the past year or so,” O’Hara wrote in early 1940 to Broadway composer Richard Rodgers. “I got the idea that the pieces, or at least the character and the life in general could be made into a book show.” Rodgers and his partner, lyricist Lorenz Hart, liked the concept and agreed to score the musical, for which O’Hara would write the book. George Abbott, who was hired as director, remembered the original script as “a disorganized set of scenes without a good story line,” so the show was reworked before and during rehearsals and O’Hara approved the changes whenever he happened to show up at the theatre. Gene Kelly, who had just starred in The Time of Your Life, took on the role of Joey, while Vivienne Segal costarred as Vera, a character newly created by O’Hara for the show. The musical opened on Christmas Day 1940 and was a hit, running for 374 performances on Broadway despite (or, perhaps, because of) its risqué subject matter. Brook Atkinson, The New York Times critic, panned the show, finding much of the content inappropriate for a musical comedy: “If it is possible to make an entertaining musical out of an odious story, Pal Joey is it. . . . Although it is expertly done, can you draw sweet water from a foul well?”

In the late 1940s Doris Day had a Top Ten hit with the show’s most famous number, “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” The song’s popularity led to the first studio recording of the show, which in turn led to a 1952 stage revival starring Harold Lang and Segal, reprising her role as Vera. O’Hara made a few changes to the second act and Rodgers revised several lyrics. (Hart had died in 1943.) The show proved even a bigger hit, enjoying a fifteen-month run of 540 performances—the longest of any revival of a musical in Broadway history to that date. This time Atkinson sang a different tune, praising “the tight organization of the production, the terseness of the writing, the liveliness and versatility of the score, and the easy perfection of the lyrics.” Recalling that he had not been “enchanted” the first time he saw the show, Atkinson now acknowledged that it “broke the old formula and brought the musical stage to maturity. . . . Pal Joey was a pioneer in the moving back of musical frontiers, for it tells an integrated story with a knowing point of view.”

“Joey’s is an American voice from the second act of the American century,” writes the novelist Thomas Mallon, “a time when the country’s wisecracks and slang, thanks to movies and even to books, wrapped themselves around the thoughts and vocal cords of half the world.” We present from The New Yorker’s 1939 Christmas issue one of John O’Hara’s original Pal Joey stories. In a mere four pages, it showcases the louche, tough-guy patter that would make its creator a rich man.

Note: Onawentsia Club, mentioned on the last page, is a country club in Lake Forest, Illinois.

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